Using the Internet as a medium for sharing photos is becoming widely popular due to the immediacy and extensive reach to audiences. The methods of sharing such photos are increasingly more sophisticated, ranging from sending email messages with photos attached to specific recipients to uploading photos to photo sharing and social networking sites. Consequently, photos can be shared to varying extents, ranging from a single trusted recipient to virtually everyone with access to the Internet, including strangers who may have other agendas besides appreciating the photos.
Depending on the content of the photos, public sharing of photos may be a privacy concern to a user, because the photos may show, for example, the inside of a private residence and possibly children playing. Technological advances that enable capturing of information related a photo and storing such information in the corresponding metadata heightens such concerns. For example, the geolocation of where a photo is captured can be stored in the metadata by a device equipped with a built-in GPS receiver, allowing the subject matter of the photo to be associated with the location at which the subject matter was captured. In addition, a device with a face-recognition function enables automatic tagging of faces appearing in a photo with corresponding names and stores the tags in the metadata.
Photo sharing service providers are attempting to address the above-mentioned concerns by offering various security measures as part of the sharing process. Depending on the photo sharing site, the security measures may range from providing a global setting for enabling or disabling the sharing of geotags (geolocation tags) for the entire photo collection of a user, to providing a per photo setting for sharing a geotag with selected groups of people, e.g. friends, family, everyone, etc. Even though users have a mechanism to control the sharing of geotags of their photos, the actual task can be laborious and tedious due to the ever-increasing size of their photo collections. To share the geotags of a user's photo collection fully, the user is required to inspect the user's photo collection and make an appropriate setting for each photo accordingly. The time-consuming and potentially error-prone nature of this process would deter users from sharing the geotags of their photo collection as much as possible, leaving the geotags of many photos unshared even without the risk of any privacy concern. Often, the process causes inadvertent sharing of geotags of private places for many users. The practice of photo sharing service providers of making public sharing of geotags a default option exacerbates this situation. This causes users to opt in the scheme without necessarily considering the implications.
Users are in need of a more effective method that enables the users to control the sharing of geotags and other metadata of their photos individually, without requiring the users to inspect the photos to make a determination.